


Made up of Small Things

by May



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Beforus, Beforus Ancestors, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Pale Romance | Moirallegiance, Purring Trolls, Sopor Withdrawal
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-23
Updated: 2015-03-23
Packaged: 2018-03-19 04:30:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,702
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3596415
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/May/pseuds/May
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When they had a purpleblood, almost five sweeps and without a lusus, you were the one who needed to breach the gap.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Made up of Small Things

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Makocchi](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Makocchi/gifts).



> I went for the age difference h/c option, I hope you enjoy it!

Near to the coastline, you have another hive. In clean silver and glass, it is your presence on land and a spectacle for landwellers. As a wiggler with a future mapped out in spaces, it used to be a spectacle for you, too. At twelve sweeps, you know its insides almost as much as you know your underwater hive.

It’s raining, the water slipping down windows and collecting at the base of the pane before running off the edge. They will either continue or stop damply on the smooth side of the palace. The clouds twist behind them and, behind the blur of the water, they seem so old and you feel so little.

In your wigglerhood, you had close access to a selection of texts from the palace libraries and you displayed them along the wall of your underwater respiteblock. In the ones that were fairy tales, the princesses came in your template, and had a future that unravelled like a shimmering carpet. But you weren’t in the detail until you moved to the dense lists and complex prose of history books.

You’re in a large relief block that runs into shadow at the corners. Portraits stare across at each other and meet in eternity on the walls, and suits of armour are still and empty faced between them. You’d have to try hard to make it feel unlived in, now, when it was once uncomfortable under your feet and all around you. But you know these remnants, and the room is allowed to feel insular against the rain outside.

Gamzee sits in front of the window, his limbs splayed in an easy mess. You’ve unpacked and expanded on the blank, flat ideas that you had when you were six sweeps old, but sometimes it does come back to a cuttlefish brushing against the palm of a child.

He spreads his hands against the glass, letting the rainwater make rivulets between his fingers. He’s never any more energetic than he wants to be, but he’s wearing noticeably thin and tired now that you’re bringing him off the sopor slime. In his reflection, his eyes are dark and heavy, and lacking any soporific drag. Above that, his horns are in negative and you can tell what shape they’re going to be, one day. When they had a purpleblood, almost five sweeps and without a lusus, you were the one who needed to breach the gap.

In a dull way, he misses his lusus. You might have thought of a lone, crawling mammalcub, or a tear slowly running down the face of a troll in a culling commercial. You might have expected a breaking sob into the skirts of your gown.

Instead, it’s a bland misery; like a dead light behind the haze in his eyes. He hadn’t come close to you and he’d kept his arms by his sides, even as he’d looked you in the eye. When the Empress culls, she needs to cull best, but your six sweep old self had not sparkled inside you.

The church works in a spiral, insular at the center and cordial at the edges. You’ve seen the trolls with their leaflets, and you’ve met the priests inside. You know that, at some strata, there was the very best to send you a message, and it had been polite down to the letter.

After his final molt and with strengthened bonds between church and court and sea and land, you’ll give him back.

Gamzee gives a quick, agitated shift on his haunches and stares up at the sky and into the center of the curling clouds. Narrowing his eyes and pressing his teeth against his bottom lip, he winces. His ears give an irritated flick.

 “Gamzee.” You know how to talk to a crowd so you know how to talk to a wiggler. And, in the quiet room, your voice is smooth and mild. “Does your head hurt?”

Sometimes, he wakes up in the middle of the day and wanders around the maze of the hive. You did assure him that he needs to tell somebody if he can’t sleep for some reason, but he told you that he had a headache, and also that it seemed like something was scratching on the inside of his head. The second point came before the first; you know that Gamzee’s blood is purple enough that he’ll be pretty near the center of that spiral.

“You’re just not used to things.” Like a shed skin, he’s getting rid of something that would drag and hamper him. But, without it, he’s cold and raw. Your medicullers won’t give him any painkillers out of caution. “Once you’ve learned to live without it, it’ll hurt less, I promise.”

You were only able to catch him as early as it was possible to. It was his absence from mandated school-feeding seminars that alerted the church to his isolation. You think of other trolls in such a predicament and the six sweep inside you sparkles, after all.

Gamzee whines and scratches at the virgin red at the base of his left horn in jagged movements. He stops, sighs and rests his head against the glass.

“It motherfucking hurts,” His inflection swells and bursts in frustration. You haven’t made him stop, yet.

“I know, Gamzee, I know.” His shoulders tilting inwards, his back bending and his legs sliding neatly together underneath him, he curls in on himself. As he lowers his chin to his chest, his horns tap against the window. You continue talking with a delicate warmth. “It won’t feel better if you do that.”

His skin is nearly as smooth as yours, and he doesn’t mind going outside in the rain. After all, he’s used to the heavy sinking grain of wet sand and the sharp fizz of ozone running off the water. He does get lost, though, and you have people go and find him. Since he’s no jadeblood, you’ve had to make limits.

Gamzee splays his limbs again and flips himself over so that he’s facing you. He squints and glares into the room’s low light, his eyes slits of dim gold. Something tart constricts inside you, and you think, for a moment, of getting him something, anyway.

“Come and sit with me!” Your voice has a strange brightness, even to you. Gamzee’s face screws up further at the sound of it.

But you get a vague nod, before he scrabbles to his feet and pads over to you, bare foot, and drops down before your skirt in one languid movement.

The outward swells of his horns press against your palms when you cup them, gently. Poor nutrition has left them a little weak, but not so weak that you’ll have to worry about them breaking. When you press a finger on the tip of one, he tilts his head back towards you.

Along the fresh surface of his horns, you can feel tiny cracks, here and there. When you catch a fingernail in one, he shivers, and you wonder if you accidentally scored the horn’s growing core. That growth is happen rapidly, right now, though you know that it’ll slow right down like an old tree.

In a voice that lilts against the rain outside, you ask if he feels better. You’re both shielded in the warm core of the building, but you saw Gamzee’s old hive and how he left the door open. He was checked for skin or eye damage, though, and none was found.

“Yeah.” It’s short and cracked. Things have made something inside him dry up and splinter.

“Good!”

Rain still patters against the window as the sky growls, and your hand moves to tangle in his hair. With the care of your palace, it’s full and soft, although it was a tangled mass when he came to you. When he pushes his head back against your palm, strands catch between your fingers.

You first saw him as a knot of tiny details, starting with all the hair on top of a gangly frame. And he’d been small between two huge blueblood guards, both alert and uniform. And standing tall and thin behind him had been an attendant from the church, in full dress and grim beneath his facepaint. With a broad, spindly hand, he had dwarfed Gamzee’s shoulder. Gamzee had untied shoe laces, sagging eyelids and bone nodules on his wrists. You didn’t expect it to be so jarring.

You can’t grab as much of his hair as you’d like, even when he tilts his head further back. Catching his profile from above, you see that his cheeks are round, his nose snub, and his eyes are drifting shut.

He hums into your skirt. “It still motherfucking hurts at me a bit, actually.”

You click your tongue and don’t move your fingers at all. Gamzee screws up his brow and shifts, letting out a frustrated huff.

“Shhhhhh.” You bury your hands into his soft hair up to the knuckle, the new horn finely smooth under your fingertips. His shoulders begin to settle and his brow begins to uncrumple. A quiet rumble begins in his chest, giving a low echo to the rain.

He has an awkward, uneven purr, though, and you notice a rattle growing as you continue. He never seems bothered or embarrassed about anyone hearing it. Even when he’s a small thing in a large room, he can’t be too pitiful.

As your fingers circle his temples and his horns are hooked between your thumbs and forefingers, Gamzee grows loose in your hands. You feel his contented thrumming in his skin.

You slowly move your palms from his head to his neck, and you note your own eyelids growing heavy. He shivers when your fingernails graze along his vestigial gills. You never would have thought about that at all without this kind of intimacy with a purpleblood.

Gamzee’s route to acquiescence is always an odd one, but he is completely pliant. His cheek pressed against the silk of your skirt, the irregular rhythm of his purr rumbles into your leg, and your own body feels light and loosely corded on the inside. When he’s like this, you can even pick him up.


End file.
